Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University Professor, famous for his battle in support of individual rights to share and re-use content on the web, is asking the readers of his blog to help him find out which is the best way to deliver a remote presentation that includes video clips, audio, images and graphics.

He writes:

"Today I experimented with making a presentation remotely. If you've seen me, and my presentations, this actually might be better than me being present -- all the action is on the screen.

The problem is technical.

There's no good way to stream a wide range of content -- video, audio, slide presentations. And there's no simple way to remotely run a computer.

But the latter seems the simpler hack: I'd like to be able to send a CD of my presentation to a place I'm to speak at, and then remotely control advancing the slides. So, e.g., my voice could come over the internet, and control of a remote computer could come over the internet.

There are lots of expensive ways to do this. (e.g., Apple Remote). But is there a cheap, simple, cross-platform compatible way to do this?

Again, I want a mouse like control I can operate here that advances my presentation there."

What woud you suggest to Larry?

Andrew Drucker, one of his readers, probably came closest to provide Larry with a good clue as to where direction to look to:

"If you're going to be sending the presentation in advance and then synchronising it to your voice over the internet, why not shortcut the whole process and simply add your voice to the presentation. They can just watch/listen to the presentation and you can take questions "live" at the end. The other advantage there being that you can also allow people to download the presentations, giving you worldwide coverage!"

Exactly!

And guess which tools would be best to do this, considering Larry is on a Mac?

Yes, a PowerPoint to Flash conversion tool would really be the solution to Larry's ned. But look at what Larry wrote later having realized this himself:

"...it is insanely hard to do -- insanely, because it seems like such an obvious feature for, e.g., a PPT or Keynote presentation, but it just doesn't exist now (with any sort of reliability).

You can record a narration, e.g., in a ppt presentation, but there's no guarantee that the narration will actually stay fixed with the slide advances.

You can manually carve up a narration into individual MP3s that get attached to each slide, and fix the timing problem, but who has time for something like that?

And though Keynote promised something like this, I've yet to see how it can be used to make a truly, stand-alone, presentation.

Flash seems the most obvious platform to do this in, but again, it took lots of work to get this to work. And while Keynote promises Flash export capability, the output is not the same as the input."

And then he further ask for public support:

"I've seen products that promise to convert ppt to Flash, but I've not seen one that gives you a source file that you can work with. But am I missing something?

I'd give my right arm (though I am left handed) for a simple, automatic tool to produce stand-alone presentations, and I'd even commit to making every one of my presentations available for free one existed (which is incentive enough for some not to produce it perhaps), but so far, I've not found it. Has someone else?"

Larry has got many interesting suggestions and tips to solve his issue, but none comes really close to offer exactly what he was looking for. The issue is that most of the good tools to do this, are available only on the PC.

Here are my own recommendations:

1)Macromedia Breeze - Web-based - runs from any platform.
It can embed video, audio, images, your own presentation slides in Flash format (best conversion of all) and your synched narration.

Free trial account.

2) Apple Keynote 2 - Keynote 2 creates self-running, interactive slideshows. Perfect for special events, school projects and kiosks, they let you incorporate voiceovers, navigation arrows, hyperlinks and more. You can even export them to Macromedia Flash. "Keynote has always offered the ability to export to QuickTime, PDF, and PowerPoint, but the new release adds two more—Flash, for easy web display, and Images, which saves each slide as a separate image file (PNG, TIFF, or JPEG). In addition, a few annoying bugs from the original’s export tools have been fixed. PDF export now fully supports transparency, and embedded QuickTime movies no longer cause odd problems when exporting to QuickTime." (Source: MacWorld)

3) Marratech - this is a cutting/edge cross/platform collaboration technology that allows full recording of the event including audio, video, chat and whiteboard. Unfortunately you need to run Marratech to watch the playback. Try out free.

4) WebConference.com - cross/platform, Flash/based web conferencing technology that integrates Powerpoint delivery, audio and video, and a recording option. Try out free.

What else could he use, keeping in mind that he is on a Mac?